In Encouraging Online Engagement with Social Software I discussed the motivation for the use of social software in encoraging online, student engagment in distance education. In this post, I shall consider how we might use wikis.
Background
Wikis are straightforward to use, social publishing environments for the co-creation of web pages displayed according to a common design template. In their purest form, anybody can edit a wiki page, although it is possible to configure some wiki’s with a variety of read and write permissions. (NB it would of course be possible to host an ‘open’ wiki behind SAMS so that only – but any – students on a particular course could access it.)
Wikis typically provide comprehensive roll-back facilities allowing users to undo edits by other users (this provides a straightforward mechanism for clearing a wiki of graffiti, for example).
Some wiki’s provide WYSIWYG editors, other require the user to write pages using a simple, though sometimes arcane, form of markup. Creation of new pages, linked to from existing pages, is straightforward.
Some wiki’s support the syndication (and hence reuse) of content by providing an XML output of content pages.
Wikis – Potential Use within an Electronically Delivered Masters Course
There are several possible uses of wiki’s within courses that require online student access.
For example, a wiki may be used as an icebreaker activity, or as a discussion environment in a way that contrasts markedly with a conferencing thread: conference threads may evolve either with, or without, quoted text from previous messages contained in follow-up posts, one post might spawn conversations (within the same thread) that elaborate on different points, and which get confused in a simple threading system, and so on.
In a wiki, a conversation can evolve in a linear, or hypertext fashion over a period of time, yet individual contributions can still be identified though the history mechanism providing useful information for markers of assignments produced by student groups, for example. Animation tools allow users to see how a conversation developed over time (again based on the history mechanism) and thus gain a feeling for the interest a particular topic raised (much like being able to identify in a conference the well-discussed threads).
Wiki’s may also be used to provide a mechanism by which students create content that may be used in future presentations of a course – for example, by producing case studies or work through discussions of example software programs.
It would be particularly interesting to explore the possibility of using a wiki as a discussion environment, where ‘documents’ are constructed as a result of a conversation between participants, as well as a more traditional’ collaborative authoring environment within which several people collaboratively work together to produce a single, coherent document.
For example, experience from T396 suggests that students use conferences to solicit help from CT and each other with regard to understanding how to achieve particular things within the Flex programming language. Whilst software documentation and programming examples are provided as part of the course, it is often simple examples produced in answer to particular queries that are most successful in pedagogical terms.
Whilst conference threads can be useful for promoting a discussion ‘in real time’, with students reading each new post in an evolving thread (and where real time therefore plays a part in constructing – or maintaining – the narrative flow), it can be a laborious exercise to extract the key information post hoc from a long thread replete with acknowledgement posts (“thanks for that”, “ah, now I see”) as well as ‘contentful’ posts.
In contrast, the structure imposed by the wiki (or the target of any collaboratively authored document) does away with the possibility of content repeated (i..e quoted) from thread post to post and arguably encourages the construction of a post hoc readable (and hence reusable) document.
As well as offering the possibility of using the wiki to construct a ‘conversational document’. For example, see Online Student Engagement for a document that was produced by editing multiple messages in a convoluted email thread.
My intuition is that this sort of thing could be imagined to be the result of a ‘wiki conversation’ rather than being constructed post hoc by editing a series of email messages). Some wikis provide discussion pages that sit ‘behind’ (or alongside) content pages, as with the page history information. These discussion pages allows multiple authors to comment on the reasoning behind changes to a content page, and thus offer a ‘reflective space’ or ‘meta page’ within which discussion about the construction or continued evolution of (i.e. changes to) a content page may take place.
Imagine that you work as part of a team in small company that transfers technology from academia into industry.
In your tutor group, use social bookmarks or other ways to identify a recent academic research paper that describes the use of fuzzy logic or Bayesian reasoning in an industrial or business application.
As a group, create one or more wiki pages that review the application area and the techniques used in the paper. Also discuss how you might go about reimplement the application using FLINT, giving examples of the sorts of rule that might go into the program.
There is even potential in encouraging students to participate in the Wikipedia or Wikiversity project, since individual contributions can be identified with registered users. Peer review of a student's work by other Wikepedia users, for example, would provide not only informal assessment of the student's work (incorrect or badly written submissions would be removed or corrected) but also feedback via comments/discussion, as well as post hoc edits.
Getting students to deliver assessable material into a living knowledge network also adds a sense of realism - and use value - to the assessment (although the student could, for example, also submit their original work via a normal submission route).
Assessing students 'in the wild' would raise some eyebrows, undoubtedly, although it is possible that the long tail of the web would be necessary for submissions to Wikipedia, for example, to be evaluated by ther contributors. However, what if the students were to contribute to, and/or revise the OU's corpus of legacy teaching materials? By opening up small areas of relevant content for students to work on, it may be possible to pick the best year on year and feed it into future versions of the course, an approach advocated elsewhere as Pay-it-forward Learning.
Posted by ajh59 at September 16, 2005 09:20 PM